It took me a long time to find a way to take decent pictures. Not only the correct light, but also background and position of camera and item. It still happens often that some pieces are harder to capture as they are then others. It always stays difficult to show the piece truly as it is and give it justice.
First I started with a white background, but I found it very difficult to keep the white truly white and not grey or blue plus I was not familiar yet with photoshop or how to position the camera or piece. Uhhh looks horrible...
I always take at least 15 shots of a piece, as there will always be some out of focus or just has not 'it'.
The 'it' part is hard to explain, it is something that you see as soon as you see the picture. It has sensation, deepness and drives your attention as soon as you see the picture.
After (trying) to sell on
Rubylane for almost a year and (trying) to sell on
Etsy for six months and experiment with other colors as background. I found the grey background I use now the best. As we are with this together, my mum and I, and we both design in a different style the shop needed something calm so that it wouldn't become a messy color mix soup. The grey is warmer then white but does not take the colors away from the items and makes a good basic background.
As I didn't (and still hardly can) manage Adobe Photoshop, I started to use ACDSee and found it quite easy to manage pictures there. Of course you need good pictures as basic, but without the managing it will not 'pop' as it should. Here are the steps I go through with pictures, for our shops and blog. I take the pictures at early afternoon, when the sun is shining, but in the shadow.
Natural light is simply the best. I manage the light manual on my camera and make it +3/4 lighter (+/- Comp.) and of course on Macro setting.
This is the 'untouched' picture:
First thing is to crop it, usually, if I can, I make it square but keep in mind the Gallery mode of Etsy to keep some space at the top and bottom from the object.
Then I add Shadow/Highlights. This makes the picture not only sharper but also more 'real', touchable plus gives deepness.
Then at 'Colors', I change the Saturation, of course looking at the real object to avoid that the colors do not become as they are not in real. You have to be sure that the colors you show are truly the real colors. As you can see, the differences are very small, and look not worthy the work, but they really make a difference and each picture takes about maximum 1 minute of my time.
Finally I remove the distracting flaws of the background with Photo repair and with this picture I also cleaned the urchin a bit. Of course the cleaning job is very useful, sometimes it happens that a tiny tiny dust piece is on the piece that you can only see in the pictures but not in real. Removing a tiny dust and distracting background flaws makes the picture neat and complete.
Here another example, this time a jewelry piece, again the same steps except the photo repair. Tiny changes make a difference.
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